THE POISON GARDEN website

Pontifications on Poison

Being some ramblings on events associated with poisonous plants.

Tuesday 3rd March 2015

This is the first in a series of indeterminate
length to be posted over an indeterminate time concerning
statements and claims made by Peter Hitchens in his book ‘The
War We Never Fought’. Hitchens has a tendency, when challenged
to provide evidence for one of his claims about the harms of
Cannabis sativa, marijuana, to cite his own book as that
evidence. I’m not sure whether he truly doesn’t understand what
is meant, in science, by ‘evidence’ or whether it is just his
willful arrogance coming to the fore.

Whatever it is, I’ve thought for a while that
it might be interesting to read the book and just see if there
is anything in it that a) can be substantiated as fact or b)
though assertion rather than fact I agree with. It is over two
years since I wrote about what appeared to be a review of the
book by its author but turned out to be simply an extract.
In
this piece, I debunked the central
premise of that segment.

The delay in getting around to reading the
whole book is because I did not want to send any money Hitchens’
way. As a published author, I know that you don’t make real
money unless your book sells tens of thousands so the amount I
was depriving Hitchens of was trivial but I felt the principle
worth adhering to. Finally, on Amazon, I saw a second-hand copy
for sale meaning none of my purchase money would reach the
author and ordered it. I was rather pleased to see that the
sheet stuck into the front of the book by the library had not
been defaced by any date stamp.

Talking of defacing, I’m not one of those
people who make notes in books. I know that, when made by
someone famous especially in the work of an enemy, such notes
can add hugely to the value of a book and I know that the margin
notes left by the leading toxicologist whose library I purchased
a number of books from after his death are interesting, but I
haven’t scrawled in a book since I was a small child.

With ‘The War We Never Fought’, however, I
decided that I should note passages I wanted to follow up and
the easiest way to do this would be to make a pencil note on the
page itself. Let’s be clear; I’m starting from the position of
thinking that Hitchens’ views are abhorrent and add to the harms
caused by drugs. For that reason, I want to be sure that I
record all the points I think worth exploring to ensure I
include those where he seems to be making sense.

Up to the end of Chapter 2, I’ve made 34
annotations so, if I examine every one in detail, this will be a
long series of pieces. Perhaps we’d best start and see how far
we can get before we need a break.

Building an argument is like building any
structure; you need to establish your foundations first. If the
structure you are constructing is flimsy or poorly designed, it
is very important to appear to have strong foundations. These
often take the form of assumptions being presented as
universally accepted truths.

Hitchens, who is not really that interested in
cannabis per se but wants to use its story to demonstrate his
core belief that the modern world is decaying, wants to
establish as his foundation that things used to be OK but
recently things have gone badly. Thus, in his preface he states;

‘…I think it is important for our
society to wonder why it has lately become so ready to accept
that human woe can be cured or soothed by chemicals.’

There’s likely to be a common question that
arises as I work through the pages – is Hitchens stupid or
willful? I don’t want to call him stupid so I have to assume
that he is not one of those people who thinks chemicals are a
recent discovery and that products can be truthfully advertised
as ‘chemical free’. So, if he’s not that stupid then,
presumably, he’s hoping his readers are and won’t spot the
complete nonsense in that statement.

Given that there are still plenty of examples
of the ‘chemical-free’ claims made for products it may well be
that there are people who do not understand that when the
Egyptians, at least 3,500 years ago, gave children a mixture of
opium, from Papaver somniferum, and fly excrement to assist
them to get to sleep they were administering chemicals to soothe
‘human woe’. Nor may they be aware that, in medieval Britain,
Chelidonium majus, greater celandine, was carefully cooked
up with honey to make an eye salve. I’ve just selected two
examples; there is evidence of humans medicating themselves for
around the past 10,000 years.

Hitchens’ attempt to make it appear that human
use of substances intended to modify the performance of the body
or brain is a recent innovation, therefore, falls. That is
important because it undermines a statement made early in
Chapter 1. Hitchens says;

‘Drug taking, which separates reward
from effort, walks in step with the sexual revolution, which
separates the sex act from fertility, and so also separates it
from marriage, patience, fidelity and constancy. It also marches
in time with the successful campaign to end the taboo against
pornography, ludicrously disguised as a battle against
censorship.’

I did say, above, that I would be looking out for areas where I
agree with Hitchens. I do agree that the years since WWII have
seen a sexual revolution. Attitudes to interpersonal
relationships have changed, the development of contraception has
altered family life and there is much greater tolerance of the
full range of sexuality than there used to be. Where we differ
is that I see these changes as overwhelmingly positive.

Hitchens is a clever writer who sets traps for the unwary. He is
careful not to claim outright that drug-taking is the cause of
these changes so limits himself to saying they march in parallel
hoping that readers will make the connection for him. However,
as seen above, the use of psychoactive substances is not recent
so it cannot be said to be ‘in step’ with the other changes that
Hitchens dislikes.

To further illustrate his contention that the world is in
serious decay, Hitchens claims that educational standards are
falling and quotes a piece in the Daily Telegraph
saying that Oxford University Examiners have reported various
failings of students taking their finals.

Hitchens writes;

‘Many [Oxford graduates] have no idea who Mr. Micawber is’

He gives a footnote citing ‘Oxford University examiners’ reports
quoted in the Daily Telegraph.

There’s a couple of problems here. First is that the reference
to Mr. Micawber is a quote from David Palfreyman, Bursar of New
College and director of the Oxford Centre for Higher Education
Policy Studies and not from the examiners’ reports and the
second is that the Bursar was referring to ‘kids’ i.e. the raw
material arriving at Oxford not graduates who have completed
their degrees.

Claiming to quote from an academic document but actually
misquoting from a report on that document is the sort of thing
Ben Goldacre has a lot of fun with in ‘Bad Science’. Anyone
familiar with Goldacre’s book will also know all about
cherry-picking. Hitchens wants to show that standards are
declining so he relies just on the Telegraph story and makes no
mention of
this rebuttal
just four days after the Telegraph piece.

Ignoring the latest information because it destroys the point is
something that Kathy Gyngell and Kevin Sabet and their like
strongly favour. I’m trying not to prejudice my reading but I
suspect I’ll find more examples of Hitchens doing the same thing
as I go through.

These two points, that use of ‘chemicals’ is recent and that
standards are falling on many fronts, take care of 5 of the 34
annotations I mentioned above. I’ll break off here and pick up
on another day. I’ll have to consider whether I can support a
point by point commentary or whether I need to look for
similarities and combine several specifics into more general
comments. I should like to stick to the point by point approach
so as not to be exposed to attack on the grounds of
cherry-picking or misrepresenting the overall work but, if the
whole book continues at the error rate seen in the early
chapters, that may just be impossible.

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